1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printer, a printer control method and a record medium for recording a program. In more detail, the present invention relates to a printer provided with an auxiliary storage such as a hard disk (HD) separately from a buffer memory, a printer control method and a record medium for recording a program.
The present application is based on Japanese Patent Application No. Hei. 11-63877, which is incorporated herein by reference.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional type printer stores print job data from a host computer in a receive buffer, sequentially interprets data stored in the receive buffer, generates image data for printing and output and prints it. As such a printer has only to sequentially interpret and print as described above, a so-called local printer has only to have a memory enough to temporarily store data for one band or one page for example according to the format of its print engine.
However, recently, as the coloring, enhancing the resolution and others of a printed document are promoted as a computer, image processing technology and others develop, the quantity of print job data increases. In the case of a network printing system that plural host computers share a printer via a network such as a local area network (LAN), print job data from plural host computers is required to be successively processed.
If a memory mounted in a printer has only capacity for one page, a host computer which desires a document for a few hundred pages to be printed is required to continue to send print job data for a long time. The other many host computers connected via the network are required to wait for a long time.
A printer provided with an auxiliary storage such as HD inside the printer so that received data is stored in the auxiliary storage so as to store enormous print job data promptly and release a host computer early is proposed recently. In this specification, the above auxiliary storage is not limited to HD, includes various recording devices using a record medium such as an optical record medium and a magneto-optic record medium and means a storage speed for writing and reading data to/from which is slower than a conventional type buffer memory, that is, RAM. At least, the reduction of speed caused by an access of a head to a record medium such as a disk is caused by the above auxiliary storage. For an example of the auxiliary storage, a case using HD will be described below.
As a large quantity of data can be stored in a printer utilizing the above auxiliary storage, a host computer can be released early. However, as data is read or written by moving a head to a predetermined position on a rotated storage medium in HD used for an auxiliary storage, speed for reading or writing data is slower than that in case a memory such as a random access memory (RAM) is accessed. For example, normally, even if speed for receiving data from a network is 1 to 2 MB/second and processing speed in an image data generation section is 1 MB/second, the data transfer rate of HD is approximately 500 kB/second and is slow.
Therefore, in the case of only the transfer of print job data via an auxiliary storage, it takes much time to write and read to/from the auxiliary storage, and thus, printing processing is greatly delayed. In this case, if a high speed interface, DMA and others are adopted, the data transfer rate of an auxiliary storage is enhance, however, the cost of a printer is increased.
In the meantime, if printing processing is preceded and processing for writing and reading to/from an auxiliary storage is left until later, speed for receiving from a network is greatly reduced and the release of a host computer is delayed.